Privacy Notice for Parents

Privacy Notice – How we use children’s information

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

The data protection team with responsibility for monitoring this privacy notice are Clare Worlin and Cheryl Beisly.

Westwood Farm Community Pre-School will collect, record, process and keep personal information on you, your child and the information provided referring to their family / extended family members. This is in accordance of Article 9 ‘processing of special categories of personal data’ under the GDPR.

We use this data to:

Support children’s learning
Make assessment on children’s development
Safeguard the children in our care in accordance with relevant legislation and our policies and procedures.
Comply with Government legislation
Assess the quality of our services

Westwood Farm Community Pre-School hold and share two kinds of records on children attending our setting.

Developmental records.

These include:

Developmental information collected prior to your child/ren starting at our setting.
A copy of your child/ren’s 2 year old progress check
Observations of children in the setting, photographs, video clips, samples of work and developmental assessment records.

A summary of the child’s EYFS profile report.

Personal records

These include:

Personal details – including the information provided on the child’s registration form and any consent forms and characteristics such as ethnicity, language and nationality.
Contractual matters – including the child’s days and times of attendance, a record of the child’s fees and/or funding entitlement, any records of fee reminders and/or disputes

Emergency contact details – including those people, other than parents/guardians with authorisation to collect the child from the setting.

Children’s health and well-being – including discussions about every day matters regarding the health and well-being of the child with the parent/guardian, records of accidents and medication records.
Safeguarding and child protection concerns – including records of all welfare and protection concerns and our resulting actions, meetings and telephone conversations about the child and any information regarding a Looked After Child.
Early support and SEN – including any focussed intervention provided by our setting, a record of the child’s IEP and, where relevant, their Statement of Special Education Need.
Correspondence and reports – including letters and emails to and from other agencies and any confidential reports relating to specific children

Collecting information

Whilst the majority of information you provide to us is mandatory, some of it is provided to us on a voluntary basis. In order to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, we will inform you whether you are required to provide certain information to us or if you have a choice in this.

Storing pupil data

We ensure that access to children’s files is restricted to those authorised to see them such as the manager, deputy, designated person for child protection, the child’s key person or the setting SENCo.

These confidential records are stored in locked filing cabinets.

We retain children’s records for three years after they have left the setting, except records that relate to an accident or child protection matter. These are kept until the child reaches the age of 21 years or 24 years respectively.

Sharing information

The information that you provide to us, whether mandatory or voluntary, will be regarded as confidential. We do not share information about your child with anyone without consent unless the law and our policies allow us to do so.

We routinely share information without consent with:

schools that children attend after leaving us
our local authority for the purposes of the Early Years Census
the Department for Education (DfE) as part of statutory data collections.

We are obliged to share confidential information without authorisation from the person who provided it, or to whom it relates, when:

there is evidence that the child is suffering, or is at risk of suffering significant harm.
There is reasonable cause to believe that a child may be suffering, or is at risk of suffering, significant harm
It is to prevent significant harm arising to children, young people or adults, including the prevention, detection and prosecution of serious crime.

Further information regarding information sharing and confidentiality can be found in our policies.

Requesting access to your personal data

Under data protection legislation, parents/guardians, children and young people have the right to request access to information about them that we hold. Where a child is too young to give ‘informed consent’ the parent is the ‘subject’ of the file and has a right to see the information held.

Children’s developmental records are shared regularly with parents/guardians and formal requests to access these is not required.

To make a request for your personal information contact a member of our data protection team following the procedure detailed in our information sharing policy.

You also have the right to:

object to processing of personal data that is likely to cause, or is causing, damage or distress
prevent processing for the purpose of direct marketing
object to decisions being taken by automated means
in certain circumstances, have inaccurate personal data rectified, blocked, erased or destroyed; and
claim compensation for damages caused by a breach of the Data Protection regulations

If you would like to discuss anything in this privacy notice, please contact a member of our data protection team.

If you have a concern about the way we are collecting or using your personal data, you should raise your concern with us in the first instance or directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/